, 1887-11-18
ORIGINALITY OF THE ENGLISH.
a Race which Produces Men of Marked
Independence and Executive Ability.

a Race Which Produces Men of Marked
Independence and Executive Ability.
The English race is marked by the
power of producing independent and ex-
ecutive characters in every plane of men
tai activity. There is no lack of great
mathematician, great philosophers, great
poets, great naturalists, great generals,
who are distinctIvely great Englishmen.
But the nation possesses, in addition, the
unique power of producing men who are
to a great extent detached from social
surroundings; who are not the product
of the race nor of the day, or any theory
of heredity, or transmission, or environ
ment that is in accordance with the
usual color of national or social phenom-
ena. The average level of the English
race is commonplace, u~nidealistic, rever-
ent of h past, ~uniconoclastic. They are
slow to receive distractions, to transmute
new general conceptions into rules of
conduct-certainly more SO than the
French, possibly more so han the Ger
mans; but in the power of producing
from time to time eccentric, unclassiied
individuals of marked originality and in
dependence they are distinguished from
any of the other nations which consti-
tute what is called European civilization.
- - NSAA AAtAAA ASSS AAOAAA mo SAAcfNo
in possession of q German genius; he is a
Goethe or a Bismarck or a Helmholtz.
The only unconventional great German
man of letters that l can recall at present
is Heine, and Heine is not a German, but
a Jew of genius trying to be a Greek.
The great Frenchmen are also great in
the narrow limitations of French great
ness. Powerful and original as is the
genius of Victor Hugo, it cannot unmoor
him from his anchorage in Partisan
thought. But are there any manifesto
ton of race development on the con-
uinent that are parallel to the occult spirit
ual force which produced in England men
of the type of Marlowe and Coleridge and
Shelley? Burns and Milton and Dryden
and Cowper are legitimate race develop
ments; but from what obscure regions,
from what hidden fountains of Morse or
Celtic or Teutonic ancestry were drawn
the germs around which were built such
minds as those of Shelley and Coleridge,
minds not only un-English, but in o GER
tain sense unearthly! They are flowers;
but not Xix the blossoms of the century
plant, for whose color and bloom the
juices have been slowly segregated by
natural ~laws-whose formative cell could
be discerned by the botanist's microscope
long before IL was unIOIueu IN the crown
ing bud. They are rather what the bot
anist calls sports-abnormal develop
ments from n seed, warning us that
nature holds in restraint creative powers
for which evolution cannot account.
The explanation of this power of the
English people may lie deep in the in
scrutable laws which govern the result
of race fusion. The islands, occupied
originally by British Celts, have been in
vaded by Angles, Danes and Norman
Franks in succession. All of these were
races of marked individuality-of indi-
vidual force and contrasted features.
Perhaps we can say broadly that the
Celts were, as a race, imaginative, ex-
pressive, fond of color; the Angles-the
prevailing Acknowledgements, stub
born, silent, slow, but holding firmly to
the Teutonic conception of freedom for
the l%andholder, and tenacious of indi-
vidual right; the Danes, self reliant, en-
terprising, capable of high enthusiasm
SON of the sea; the Norman-Franks, adj
m~inistrators, men of affairs and polity,
men of the world at home in the world
of men, and inclined to social display and
elegance.-Temple Bar.